FEBRUARY

It is the first of February and it is 15 degrees outside. January has gone once again and I have no regrets at its passing. But February can be a mean month, on the one hand tantalizing me with a day over 40 degrees, then slamming down the next day with snow and ice and temperatures in the teens. At the same time, the shadows shorten while the sun takes longer to make its arc over the red mesas. And I am sitting here waiting. Waiting for a glimpse of the first bulbs to appear along the garden wall. Waiting for the canyons to drip dry so that I can explore them once again.

I don’t like snow. I grew up without it south of San Francisco in what was once the Valley of Heart’s Delight but has now turned to Silicon. Back then an infrequent cold snap might cause a thin veneer of ice to form over the rain puddles. On our way to school, we would stomp on the slick surface and watch it heave and crack. But the snow stayed far away. We could see it occasionally on the top of Mount Hamilton or, once in a blue moon, up along the ridges of Skyline Boulevard under redwoods and madrone.

My folks never skied. Never did winter sports or vacations. I was blissfully unaware of frozen landscapes until one February when I participated in a church youth group ski trip. A bunch of us took a bus ride up to Dodge Ridge, stayed two nights in a nearby lodge, and the non-skiers like myself spent the days throwing snowballs and tobogganing down the steepest slopes we could find. I met my first real girl friend on that trip. And we sat together holding hands on the way home as the bus left the mountains behind and descended back into the lowlands.

Both of my parents’ birthdays and their wedding anniversary happened in February, so I was always scrambling that month to find proper cards and presents.

When I moved to Canyonlands as a park ranger in the 70s, I experienced my first real and regular snowfalls. It stuck like white frosting to the red rock cliffs and flocked the pinyon and juniper trees. I would have to scrape it off the government jeep in the mornings before going on patrol. It was both lovely and fearful as I labored to get up the Dugway on my way to Moab for supplies. But interspersed between February storms would be days of crystal clear skies and air sharp like peppermint, canyons limned in ice, hidden ancient ruins untouched by the weather. You could curl up in one of those alcoves and feel the warmth.

For me, February has its ups and downs, and memories both happy and sad. Now I take it one day at a time, knowing there will be disappointments, happy surprises and little detours along the way.

LOOKING BACK

My dad was much better at remembering the good times than my mother. To listen to my mother you would’ve thought that her life had been one long strand of misery and deprivation. But I don’t remember any of that. And the old photographs I am looking at today do not bear that out. I am leafing through snapshots taken in those days after the war in the years before and just after my mom and dad were married. I see the playful poses….my mother jumping on his shoulders, the two of them mugging for the camera. They are enjoying the outdoors….skiing, hanging out at the beach, riding on a boat. They are almost always with close friends, laughing at parties, drinks in hand. There are even happy times with me as a small child. I can tell from the photos that I was loved.

My dad almost always remembered the fun stuff. The childhood pranks. The oddball characters that he hung out with. He could always come up with a funny story or two about those early days on the streets of San Francisco. But my mother would dwell upon things she lost somewhere along the line. There was a bitterness and despair that was so deep I cannot fathom it, because as far as I can tell we grew up in a great environment. We were all healthy, happy kids. We were mercifully bereft of any great tragedies or terrifying events. We were well cared for and well thought of. We made it through high school and beyond. We married, had kids, developed senses of humor and independence, and became good citizens. Yet somehow life let my mother down in a big way.

There came a time when she could no longer stand my dad and only communicated with him through shouts and gripes. She let the television set turn her once quick mind into mush. She let the long life of a subservient housewife beat her down. But my father was not without fault in all of this. Long ago he shackled her independence, kept a tight rein on the purse strings, determined directions, and made too many important decisions on his own. Some time in the late 1960s, the two of them set off on different paths though still bound together by marriage. My dad chose to live in the moment and let the cards fall wherever they would fall. My mother elected to chain herself to a past that became more disagreeable the more she thought about it.

I am not sure what happened way back when. Perhaps nothing at all but the fabrications of a woman somehow disappointed by life. A woman who wanted something other than an obligatory postwar marriage, a house in the suburbs, and three odd and willful children. But the early photographic proof remains that there was once some happiness and joy that through time become cracked and stained with age. There are stories in these pieces at paper that I can never unlock.

UNDER ORION'S BELT

As we drove into the Carrizo Plain from the south end, past the oil rigs and pump jacks in Maricopa, I could see that this was not going to be the verdant spring visit I had anticipated.  The land looked beat up and tired.  Soda Lake was dry.  The lumpy hills of the Temblor Range were devoid of vegetation.  And the washboarded road was playing havoc with our little camper/van.  Nevertheless we pushed on. And I became entranced once again with the sheer size and austere distances we were traversing.  And here and there I could see bursts of color.  A splash of goldfields in the chaparral.  A small bunch of roadside poppies.  A lupine or two.  These were the plants that were somehow hearty enough to reach full bloom.

 But our ultimate goal was to get a campsite in the KCL Campground, get settled in, and come up with a new strategy for exploring the Carrizo.  The campground in question has only about ten sites, and even fewer trees.  Questionable water (high in nitrates).  And a resident pair of Great Horned Owls who dwell in the large eucalyptus there.  As fate would have it, all the sites were taken.  Including a group site full of boy scouts from Santa Margarita. 

 In all the times I have camped here I have never seen a ranger of any type (it is managed by the Bureau of Land Management) nor are there any fees charged so, as unobtrusively as possible, we parked our van over to one corner of the camp and no one seemed to notice or to care.  In fact, the resident campers were downright friendly.  Across the way, Ren was traveling with her 16-year old cat, pretty much living out of her car.  She looked to be in her late 40s perhaps, in sloppy t-shirt and cargo pants.  Probably a real looker at one time but now missing four of her front teeth, and quick to tell us about her family’s ups and downs. 

 Next to us were two women who looked like researchers.  They had vials and killing jars and other various paraphernalia, and after talking to one of them, Sara, turned out they were, indeed, researchers trying to re-introduce important pollinators back into the valley.  Meanwhile, on the far side of the camp, live music was emanating from a campsite with two young men and two young women.  Fiddle, banjo, mandolin, guitar.  Bluegrass music and songs that laid down a quiet soundtrack to the afternoon.

 Ren was having trouble putting up her tent so one of the bluegrass boys came over to help.  Sara went to loan her a mallet.  Meanwhile, a pair of campers who came in late, asked us if they could set up behind our van and, of course, we said yes.  Later on I loaned them a table so they wouldn’t have to cook on the ground.  A Scout leader who had locked his keys in his car was appreciative when we gave him a wire coat hanger. Throughout the camp there seemed to be a real feeling of camaraderie and appreciation for where and who we were. 

 As the sun disappeared over the dark hills to the west, the hooting of the owls provided an impromptu chorus for the bluegrass players.  Campfires popped up all around us, and I had visions of the migrant camps in The Grapes of Wrath.  And when darkness took over, Orion rose into the center of the sky as if to watch over us and protect us all.  The Carrizo Plain no longer seemed austere and foreboding.  Our little campground was a beacon of goodwill and good feelings against the cold April night.  A small group of human beings huddled under a living canopy, pinpoints of light and life in a vast and seemingly endless landscape.  Under  Orion’s belt, we were caught up in the mystique and the magic of this raw and beautiful plain

Revisiting the Field

 

This morning I discovered where I was on Christmas Day of 1967.  I’ve been digitizing old slides, plowing through the memories, and there it was.  A picture of a bathtub in the Los Altos Hills dated 12/25/67.  The tub was on its side, having served dutifully as a cattle trough for many years, I am sure.  Beside it was an old wooden gate.  There were brown hillsides and a few oaks. And far in the background, I could see vestiges of the San Francisco Bay and the megalopolis surrounding it.  I have no other recollections of that afternoon but I bet I can reconstruct it pretty well.

That morning I would have spent with my family down in the flatlands of Mountain View, happily opening presents and sharing that all too rare feeling of togetherness.  My parents were no doubt worrying about the lengthening of my hair.  And my proclivity for wearing an old Army field jacket everywhere.  Little did they know that only a week before, I had dropped acid for the first time. Had spent the night in a crash pad in Santa Cruz with close friends, listening to Jefferson Airplane on headphones and being overwhelmed with color and sound. Feeling an overwhelming peace with the world, even as the spector of Vietnam lurked on the fringes.

But this was Christmas morning and I wasn’t high...yet.  And I cannot, for the life of me, remember any of the presents I may have gotten that morning.  But I’m sure we prolonged the process because it was that one time of the year that we were truly family.  We would have cleaned up all the wrapping paper, deciding which ribbons to keep.  Gone off and made inventory of our newly opened gifts.  And I might have stuck around until lunch time.  But at some point, one of my friends must have called me and said, “hey, we’re going up to the Field today.  Come join us!”

The Field was a large chunk of open space in the Los Altos Hills, a piece of land that had probably been a

sprawling ranch at one time but now seemed abandoned save for one big water tank at its crest.  The rest was quintessential California terrain.  Rolling land with dead gray grass, dotted with gnarled and twisted live oaks, bay laurel and chaparral.  We had “discovered” it about a year earlier while driving around the back roads getting stoned.  No one ever seemed to go there.  The land was open and inviting.  So we just called it “the Field” and began making regular pilgrimages there.  It was especially inviting in the spring when the grasses were a verdant green, and the mustard was blooming amid the apricot orchards.

More than likely on that Christmas afternoon, Phil and his sister Nina would have come by.  Or maybe my old buddy Stan.  Or any of about half a dozen co-conspirators who would whisk me away to our haven in the hills, smoking weed all the way as we climbed the winding roads beyond Foothill College and into the eucalyptus-tinged air of the coast range.  I am sure Nina would have been with me.  I was madly in love with her at the time.  She was my hippie ideal.  Skinny to a fault.  Long brown hair combed down straight.  Sharp features and deep, brown eyes.  Dark Italian skin to match my Greek-bred melanin. Short skirts.  All done up in paisley and beads.  Full of clever asides and laughter.

Our little group would have turned off the paved road onto a short, dirt drive ending at a locked aluminum gate and, to the right, a small opening in the neglected barbed wire fence.  From there it was a short walk uphill, toward the water tank, where we could all sit and smoke and look out over slate gray water of the bay, the winding sloughs, and the industrial onslaught that was usurping the shoreline.  We were likely bundled up against the December chill, but feeling the warmth of our companionship, the unspoken bonds, the outright laughter, and the blessing of many years spent together, nurtured by the same little community at the base of the hills.

Eventually the time would come to get up, lightheaded and silent, and walk back down the hillside toward the vehicle or vehicles that had brought us to this secret place.  And I think that was when I saw the old bath tub, lying on its side, rust stained and forgotten.  But a fitting memento to this place where the Ohlone once roamed, where the Spanish created a sprawling land grant that was eventually taken from them, and parceled out into farms and ranches overlooking the Valley of the Heart’s Delight below.  And now this precious little bit of acreage that was somehow spared the incursion of the wealthy.  The rambling ranchers and sprawling “starter castles” now hovering over what was soon to become the Silicon Valley.

But that Christmas Day was such a pivotal moment for all of us.  An exclamation point on the Summer of Love.  The lead-in to a year filled with intense highs and lows.  Assassinations. The fear of Selective Service.  Nixon as president. The joy of outdoor concerts, zoned-out camping trips, great bands at the Fillmore.  And toward the end, the dissolution of my romance.  The heart ache of once again being alone and having to navigate a world in confusion.  And a future that seemed both hopeless and hearkening.

 

*Afterthought:  “The Field” has long since been subdivided and filled with high-end homes, but a portion of it still remains as Byrne Park.

 

 

 

The Manic Marriage

 

I had been a park ranger all of two weeks and I was already in love.  Not just with the gorgeously carved landscape of the Pinnacles that rose up all around me, but with a young lady who lived about 300 miles away.   I had met Karen the previous year when I was hitchhiking through Big Sur and needed a place to stay.  I wandered into her campsite and we ended up sharing a sleeping bag together under towering coastal redwoods….after which I made several hitch hiking forays down to the Orange County town of La Habra where she lived.  She was barely eighteen at the time, and I was a not-much-more worldly wise twenty-three, living on mescaline and unemployment checks in Santa Cruz, California.

 So here I was, now gainfully employed and with a spacious 12’ x 16’ one-room cabin, tucked amid the sycamore trees and chain ferns of Bear Gulch, in the shadow of the rugged High Peaks.  Within a month I had my own car, an old Plymouth Valiant, and the notion to drive down to La Habra forthwith to bringeth my fair damsel back with me to our little domicile in the chaparral.  And so it came to pass.  Karen took up residence with me in the cool days of late February as I learned my trade as an interpretive park ranger.

 There was only one catch.  We had to keep the fact that I was living in sin a secret from the strict Baptist park superintendent and the even stricter Mennonite head ranger.  So Karen stayed hidden indoors most of the time, or would venture out disguised as just another tourist schlepping around the park.  I’m not sure what made me think we could carry on this charade for very long because within weeks the head ranger’s two sneaky little sons figured it out and quickly reported our indiscretions to daddy.  Even more quickly, I was confronted by said father and told, in no uncertain terms, that I’d better get rid of the girl or get married.  As I was still in a trial period and in danger of losing my dream job, I had to make a hard and fast decision.

 “Well, I guess we’ll get married” was the obvious choice.  And the quickest way to accomplish our union was to head for Reno, Nevada where we could tie the knot within 24 hours.  But we did not want to do the deed alone.  We wanted some of our close friends to share in the festivities.  So we contacted Stan, Steve and Pam who readily agreed to participate in the celebration.  So the stage was set.  We gassed up the Valiant one mid-March afternoon and headed north for the two hour drive to Stan’s house.  We smoked at least one joint along the way.

 When we reached our destination, which was Stan’s parents’ house in Los Altos, we found him sitting halfway up an apricot tree, stoned out on acid.  Nevertheless, he eagerly jumped in the back of the Valiant and off we went for our second pickup….Steve and Pam in San Francisco.  They lived out in the avenues somewhere and were ready and willing when we finally found their apartment.  They joined Stan in the back seat as we made a beeline over the Bay Bridge, and east toward the Sierra Nevada.  Over the next few hours, much weed was circulated through the Valiant’s vinyl interior, and spirits were very high as we climbed ever upward.

 As darkness descended so did some unanticipated snow, and soon enough we were forced to find a set of chains somewhere so we could continue on our madcap marital adventure.  It was through sheer will that the five of us, in our spaced out condition, were able to install said chains and continue our journey to “the biggest little city in America”.  We pulled into Reno close to midnight, found a cheap motel, and rented a room for all five of us.  Karen and I took one bed, and Stan, Steve and Pam took the other.  But any semblance of sleep was to elude us as we congratulated ourselves on having made it over the mountains by taking mescaline.

 Came the dawn and we miraculously found the county courthouse where, after filling out the necessary paperwork, Karen and I were wed in a ceremony so brief I cannot remember any of it.  I do remember driving back up the Sierras, this time in bright sunshine.  We stopped somewhere near Donner Summit where we all got out and had a snowball fight.  Then back into the car for the drive down into San Francisco to drop off Steve and Pam, and then on down to the Peninsula to disgorge Stan not far from the tree we picked him up at.  But still before us was the two hour drive back down to the Pinnacles and our little cabin of dreams.  We arrived just as the late afternoon sun was throwing long shadows through the live oaks and gray pines.

 But here is the kicker.  After settling back down to domestic bliss, I was never asked to show a marriage license nor any other proof that we were legally wed.  We could have faked it, and we probably should have.  The marriage lasted just over two years, after which we amicably separated and I bought a copy of “How to Do Your Own Divorce in California”.  I learned how to do all the paper work myself.  Karen was a dutiful respondent. She and I split up our record collection, and she took the dog, and I returned to my life as a solitary ranger in a strange land.  In the end, the divorce cost me $18 in filing fees.

 And don’t think this valuable lesson was not taken to heart.  A couple of years later when I had fortuitously met another lady friend, and I was just about to move to southern Utah for a job at Canyonlands National Park, the two of us agreed to buy a couple of cheap rings, and masquerade as an old married couple.  Of course, the ruse worked.  And in the long run it was a lot less complicated and a lot less painful than making a midnight run to Reno.

 

 

 

 

 

Christmas 2020

 

It’s 7 o’clock on Christmas morning.  The house is still asleep.  Outside a milky blue glow to the east silhouettes the trees and telephone poles.  No snow this year.  Just an icy stillness beyond the windows.  I am the first one up, as always, so I have already played Santa and stuffed the stockings that now hang distended from the mantle.  In a few hours all the packages underneath the tree will have been opened, their wrappings scattered about for the cat to play with.  But for now, there is a look of perfection, a kind of symmetry in all the squares, rectangles and oddly shaped bundles under the tree.

 The silence of winter,  The memories gathered over seventy Christmases.  Yuletides in the desert.  Yuletides by the sea.  And the almost ancient family ones in the heart of suburbia, when petty differences and misunderstandings were temporarily set aside for the laughter and comfort of home.  And mom was Mom.  And dad was Dad.  And the siblings were not a nuisance but necessary cogs in the familial wheel.

 The lites shine brightly this morning in spite of the decades.  Each ornament seems to have its own story so that the tree becomes an anthology of little vignettes and events, bound by the turning earth and all the people I love and have loved, and all the places I have been like this one, with a decorated tree in a corner of the room, on a cold morning in December and the beginning of another winter.

The Skylight

Several nights a month the full moon pokes its opal colored dome over the Grand Mesa, and slowly ascends into the Colorado night sky, losing both its warm hue and imposing size along the way.  As it rises ever higher, it gradually floats over Mantey Heights, sending milky shafts of light through the skylight in our bathroom.  Depending upon the time of year and the moon’s position in the sky, the light will slide down along the wall and into our bathtub or it may tickle our towel rack before reaching the floor. For a few hours, it becomes a celestial night light both calming and intriguing, and I look forward to its arrival every month.

 I have always wondered why more houses do not have skylights.  Why more people don’t eschew electricity for that natural light. When I was a small child in San Francisco, we had a skylight in our upstairs bathroom.  It was one of those kind that had chicken wire inside the glass that made a pattern of hexagons across the ceiling.  My grandmother’s old house in the City had one too.  Always emitting that clean, airy glow even through the numerous foggy days in the Richmond District.

 And when we moved into our new house just one year ago, I was immediately delighted to see that small rectangle of glass on the bathroom ceiling.  Since our bathtub was not fully functional, I put a dozen or so house plants in and around it, and it has become a nursery, the plants sending their tendrils upward toward the skylight and reveling in the humidity from the nearby shower.  And speaking of the shower, there is a real pleasure in soaping up under its steamy and streamy output, while looking up at a window of deep blue sky where I can gain some measure of what the day may be like outside. Sometimes I can watch the movement of whispy clouds overhead as I rinse the shampoo from my hair. Even on winter days when the snow lies heavy over the top of the skylight, the glow still filters through as if I am caught under some weird avalanche.

 But it is those moonlit nights that I love the best.  As I lie in my bed looking into the bathroom, the light slowly enters.  I’m never quite sure what part of the wall it will decide to invade, but it always makes a shaft that mirrors the skylight above it.  When I move in for a closer look, it seems as if the plants are swaying and reaching toward the ephemeral glow. There is a vibration of illumination. 

I know it is all reflected light from the sun and I can appreciate the science of it all. But mostly I can be grateful for that skylight where, for a few hours every month, I can capture pieces of that rather holy moonlight, and make it my own